Facebook, Messenger and Instagram may soon support cross-app notifications

I have a lot of contacts on Facebook, who publish every picture they post on Instagram to Facebook as well. And then message me over messenger, and ask me to write a good, deep caption for the post. Do you see the common axis here? All of these platforms with users running into the billions, are part of the Facebook family. And the company is now stressing this point by bringing cross platform notifications.

Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram are currently said to be testing a enw feature that will allow these apps to display alerts in each other’s notification stream. So, say you are browsing the social networking platform’s app and suddenly someone likes that new picture you posted on Instagram a couple of hours ago. You will get a notification on Facebook and you could instantly switch to Insta by clicking on the same.

Of course, Facebook’s intent is pretty clear here. The company hopes that by bugging you with notifications it will keep you moving back and forth between its own app ecosystem. I am not a particularly avid social network enthusiast, but I am sure there are people who get notifications on one or the other of these applications the whole day. This way, they will be kept shuffling from one app to the other — leading to a net rise in user engagement.

The company is currently testing the feature. Speaking with the TechCrunch, it said:

We are conducting a very small test to make it easier for people to discover and connect with the people and things they care about. We’re exploring ways to help people switch more easily between their Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram accounts

As if people weren’t already perfectly capable of discovering stuff on these applications when they wanted to.

Meanwhile, the icon comes on clicking the profile icon on your app. Once you tap it, you will be displayed a sum total of all your notifications from Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. And god help you if you have friends who like tagging you in pictures. It is likely that the social networking platform will make this feature optional rather than compulsory.